A Roosevelt Hotel doorman stepped forward and opened the rear door for us; Forrestal gestured for me to step in first, and I stepped over the running board and inside. Seats faced each other in the rear of the limo, with a gray-curtained division window providing privacy from the driver; the interior was spacious and dark leather and seated way over to the left, by a gray-curtained window, was William Miller.
“Sorry for the hugger-muggery,” Miller said in his radio announcer’s baritone, bestowing me a bland smile. As always, he wore a dark suit; his tie was so dark a red it was nearly black, too. But then, what would a hearse be without an undertaker?
I sat across from Miller while Forrestal slid in beside him.
“You never quite sound like you mean it,” I said to Miller, “when you’re apologizing to me.”
Miller’s feminine lips kissed me a little smile. “That must be why I’m not attached to the diplomatic corps.”
The limo began to move. We were taking a tour of Hollywood with our curtains closed.
I sat with my hands on my knees. “Let me start off by saying what a swell job you government boys have done negotiating Amelia’s return.”
Forrestal was still smoking his pipe; its pleasantly pungent aroma was creating a minor fog. He and the lanky Miller made a Mutt and Jeff pairing, albeit a somber one. These guys were a lot of laughs. Like a barrel of monks.
Eyes hard and cold under the ridge of black eyebrow, Miller said, “The Japanese steadfastly deny any knowledge of the whereabouts of Miss Earhart or her plane.”
“You left out Fred Noonan.”
A tiny shrug. “So I did. How tactless. Or Noonan, either.”
I shook my head, grinned. “Somehow I can’t buy Uncle Sam backing Elmer Dimity’s sailboat safari. What’s really going on here?”
“We would like you to accept the Foundation’s commission,” Miller said.
“What, to keep an eye on them?”
“Not precisely. The Navy has long since conducted a thorough search of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands; Captain Johnson’s efforts there are almost certainly destined to be redundant.”
I gestured over at Forrestal. “Hey, you can ask your pal Jim, here—I didn’t tip Dimity and Margot that their skipper’d have to get into Japanese waters, to make their time and money worth spending.”
Outside, the occasional sound of a band playing in a night-spot provided sporadic background music for our conversation. With the frequent honk of a horn and general traffic sounds, my guess was we were gliding down the Sunset Strip.
“I appreciate your discretion,” Miller said. “You’ve honored your contract with us…. In fact, I’m here to bring you back into the service of your government.”
I shook my head, no. “They haven’t passed the draft yet, bud….”
Miller leaned forward ever so slightly. “Nate, the information we have is limited…our intelligence in the Japanese-held sectors of the Pacific is sketchy and secondhand, to say the least. But we have reason to believe Earhart and Noonan were picked up either by a fishing boat or a launch from a battleship.” A slight bump in the road sent him leaning back into his cushioned seat. “There’s been speculation that they have been transferred to Tokyo, but our best educated guess…aided by some very indirect intelligence…convinces us she’s being held on an island called Saipan.”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
The black ridge of eyebrow lifted in a facial shrug. “Few in America have. It’s a jungle island in the Western Pacific, in the Marianas chain, fifteen miles long, five miles across at its widest point. The Japs have a ‘development corporation’ there, Nan’yo Kohatsu Kaisha. They specialize in sugar production, operating three plantations growing sugar cane, and two mills producing crude sugar.”
“Isn’t that sweet.”
We seemed to be at a stoplight.
“Not really. We believe Nan’yo Kohatsu Kaisha is largely a front for military construction. We know they have a small seaplane base at Tanapag Harbor, and believe they’re building airstrips all around the island. Saipan is only 1,250 nautical miles from Tokyo, potentially the most important supply base and communications center for the Central Pacific.”
“And this is where you think Amelia and Noonan are being held?”
Forrestal got into the act. “There’s a military prison on the island. We believe that when war comes, and it will, Saipan will likely become headquarters for Jap military operations in that part of the Pacific.”
I blew out some air. “For having sketchy intelligence, you fellas know a lot.”
Things had quieted down outside the limo; perhaps we were rolling through a residential area now.
“Not really,” Miller admitted. “Except for a few details that we will in time share with you, you already know damn near as much as we do.”
“Then why are you so convinced Amelia is still alive?”
Forrestal responded to that one, the small dark eyes fixed on me like gunsights. “She would be a valuable propaganda pawn to the enemy, in the early days of the inevitable war…as evidence that we committed acts of espionage, of war, against Japan during peacetime.”
“Also,” Miller said, “she’d make a valuable prisoner for them to swap, should we have any Japanese envoy or ambassador or prominent citizens in our hands, after open hostilities begin.”
Forrestal was nodding. “And these are among the reasons that we would like to extract Miss Earhart from Japanese hands, before the war begins.”
“Why the hell didn’t the Japs tell the world they had her in the first place?” I asked. “And embarrass us then?”
Somewhere a dog was barking.
“Amelia Earhart is a beloved figure around the world,” Miller said. “That admiration, particularly among young women, crosses all borders. That means the Japs would have to release her, at some point.”
I frowned at this logic. “Even if they painted her as a spy?”
Miller gazed at the gray curtained window, as if he were taking in the scenery. “I believe so. And therein lies one of the reasons they’ve held her, and it’s a time-honored one: she knows too much. She knows the nature and the extent of the military build-up by the Japs in the Pacific, particularly on Saipan, if indeed she’s being held there. Acts of war that she could and no doubt would report.”
A nasty thought formed and I reluctantly expressed it: “Then why haven’t they quietly killed her and buried her on that hellhole?”
“Because of the factors we mentioned before,” Miller said with a small, inappropriate smile. “Her propaganda value, her worth in a prisoner exchange…but also there’s the wealth of aviation knowledge in her mind. What she and Noonan know about the Electra.”
Forrestal frowned at Miller. “I don’t believe it’s necessary to get into that.”
“Into what?” I asked. “If you want my cooperation, gentlemen, you’ll need to be as forthcoming as possible. I have one motivation here: getting Amelia back from the Pacific where you lost her.”
Forrestal shook his head, no, but Miller sighed and said, “One of the reasons we know she’s alive…or at least why we know that she was kept alive, for a time…”
Forrestal gripped Miller’s arm. “Bill, no.”
Miller lifted Forrestal’s hand off, as if it were something distasteful that had landed there, and gave him a smile that was really a frown; then his face turned sober as he looked at me and said, “The Japanese fighter plane is known as a ‘Claude’…also as a ‘Zero.’ A well-designed, successful plane, particularly up against the Chinese, who were notoriously lousy pilots, by the way. But the Claude, the Zero, has had, chronically, a drawback…it’s inclined to crash.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’d call that a drawback in an airplane.”